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Re: Question from a re-virginized newbie

It's a very long way to go by yourself unless you have a lot of time and a
supportive engineering team who know what DITA is and what it can do for
the company. Some engineering-oriented start-ups that are XML-centric will
encourage and support you to use DITA, but most won't. For a small
organization, it's usually like swatting a mosquito with an AK-47. Managers
who want things done quickly and efficiently won't have the patience for it.

The best way to get trained is on the job. If you enjoy information
architecture and want to go in that direction in your career, by all means
go the Open Toolkit route. Otherwise, just learn enough by reading the
books Tony cited to get familiar with the concepts, so you can show a
hiring manager that you have the chops to learn the job. It gets boring to
do the same processes day after day, so some doc managers I know are keep
losing writers who want to do other things.

Most writers who are in DITA organizations use an elaborate framework that
has already been set up professionally to give good publishing and results,
especially for localized documentation. In my last company, we had to spend
months coming up to speed - the processes you have to learn are quite
intricate. For localization, you have to pre-select every single version of
every file and support it with all the right components, and it can get
quite hairy if you are sharing those topics with other writers.

It's not easy. When I finally got my docs localized, I felt like I'd run a
marathon.

In my current company, the writers don't go the whole way to publishing the
docs and doing the localizing themselves. It's probably easier, but also
probably less satisfying. I always want to see a document I've written, not
just feed content into the CMS's maw.

Fortunately, I still get to use Flare and Lingo, despite the fact that I
work in a big company. Don't ask me how that happened - I figure it's all
because I built up good karma in a previous life..:-0